Wired:If stock-market prices are signals, then successful initial public offerings (IPOs) of Silicon Valley companies are like sudden, blaring foghorns about the obsessions of this strange little fiefdom. When they hear the racket, everybody here turns to see what's going on, even if they don't understand what it is, writes Danny O'Brien.
This month's klaxon was the IPO of VMWare, a 10 per cent sell-off that soared 75 per cent on its first day, and whose current price implies a valuation of $27 billion (€19.8 billion) for the company, putting it in the same league as Microsoft, Oracle and Apple and ahead of the Ford Motor Company.
VMWare is a software manufacturer with a single trick: its products allow "hardware virtualisation". Such one-trick ponies don't usually get this kind of attention, but that's because VMWare's particular trick reaches out to cover almost all of the challenges of modern large-scale computing. The success of VMWare's IPO will mean that a lot more money will be heading to this sector (beyond the $200 million revenues VMWare was already making), so it's worth understanding how virtualisation is changing the software and computer hardware markets. VMWare's software is, in effect, a cruel trick on operating systems.
Programs such as Windows and Linux generally take control over a whole computer, imposing their will on the entire hardware. VMWare slips its software in before these operating systems take control, and sets up its own environment, an environment where Windows thinks it is in charge, but is in fact only working within a fake hardware environment, puppeteered by VMWare.
Less control for Windows means more control for the end user. In particular, VMWare lets its customers run more than one operating system side by side. Its software creates two or more "virtual machines" and users can boot whichever operating system they want, in parallel, on the same computer. If one of those operating systems crashes, the other will continue unharmed.
VMWare's bread and butter comes from the business use of these virtual machines. Sysadmins of large networks of computers like the flexibility virtualisation gives them: for instance, they can take multiple slow-legacy servers, and migrate them untouched into virtual machines running on a single host.
VMWare's competitors have found other markets for virtualisation products.
Xen, a company that sells a Linux-only virtualisation system, is the basis behind Amazon's innovative EC2 system. EC2 lets individuals start up virtual PCs using the spare cycles of Amazon's own server farms, running their own software and paying a few pennies per hour for the service.
Xen's virtualisation system means Amazon doesn't have to worry about its customers' code interfering with the rest of its set-up or each other. It also means customers can try out their imaginary computer at home on their own virtual machines, save that machine to disk, then transfer the "virtual image" they've created to run remotely on the EC2 server. It's like being able to freeze a computer in its tracks, dump it onto a hard drive, and then be able to start it elsewhere in the world as though it had never been paused.
Closer to home, another big virtualisation market has proven to be Mac users. Since Steve Jobs moved the Macintosh line to run on the same Intel processors as Windows PCs, it has been theoretically possible to use virtualisation to run Mac and Windows software simultaneously on the same machine. Companies such as Parallels have taken that potential and turned it into a beautifully integrated end-user application: where clever hacking means Windows programs and Mac programs can share the same desktop, hard drive and even copy and paste between the two worlds.
Virtualisation is still in its technical infancy and seems to be one of those ideas that is set to spawn new applications for the foreseeable future. Just this week, I've seen two new proposed uses begin to flex their muscles. A debugger for coders that tracks and records every operation of a program, so that developers can "rewind" time and go back to the moment just before a bug makes its appearance, could be hardwired into virtual machines. That means you could potentially undo a mistake by restoring your entire computer to the moment before you made it. And some virtualisers have suggested that the virtual machine model could be turned inside out: convincing an operating system that it is running on an incredibly powerful single machine, when in fact it is running on a virtual computer made up of dozens of real ones.
Companies such as Microsoft have previously pushed for "trusted computing", where hardware would be able to guarantee that the underlying software was in complete and secure control of the hardware beneath it.
Trusted computing was sold, among other uses, as a way of making films and music impossible to copy.
In the virtual future, no software can be confident that it is not being secretly misled by end users. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that end users rather like it that way: in control of their own machines, real and virtual.
